Flattened into replicable images, dyed openly chemical colors, and printed en masse, the Pop artwork heralded the triumph of global consumer capitalism. Exploding in the 1960s, Pop Art swept away the purity, elitism, and expressiveness of modern art in favor of pleasure, playfulness, and the merging of high and low culture. Often considered the first postmodern movement, Pop Art ushered in the contemporary art market, transformed art production, and challenged prevailing notions of art, authorship, and originality. If modern art held art apart as a space for contemplation and criticism of the world, Pop mirrored mass visual culture with an ironic twist on the language of the marketplace. “Pop art is about liking things,” Andy Warhol famously claimed, but can the mirror of Pop criticize? And without critical distance what becomes of the political?
In this course, we will study Pop Art against the turbulence of the 1960s including the rise of countercultural movements, the opposition to the Vietnam War, and the gains of the Civil Rights Movement. We will follow Pop through the rise of neoliberalism, and the consolidation of American cultural and political hegemony in the 1970s and 1980s. We will study works by Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Elaine Sturtevant, Ed Ruscha, Jasper Johns, Frank Gehry, Candy Darling, Dorothy Grebenak, and others. Though the class will focus on American Pop, we will also look at the more overtly political Pops of the Soviet Union and Brazil. Finally, we will study the central role played by Pop Art in the transition from modernity to postmodernity. Readings will draw from contemporary sources and later scholarship, including art historians like Lucy Lippard, Arthur C. Danto, and Hal Foster, as well as theorists of the postmodern including Frederic Jameson, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, and Marshall McLuhan.
